USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Waterbury > The churches of Mattatuck : a record of bi-centennial celebration at Waterbury, Connecticut, Novermber 4th and 5th, 1891 > Part 15
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But the interesting exercises which are to follow admonish me that I must be brief. There is time simply to present to you the Christian salutations of the venerable and historic town and churches
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which I have been invited to represent, and to con- gratulate you upon your past successes and your bright outlook. That past you can grasp securely in your memory, as a priceless treasure, and your future, as some one has humorously said, is all before you.
Sunday before last, the church of which I am pastor celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of its organization, and the twentieth of my ministry to it. As I thought of those seventy-five years of church life, it made me feel quite venerable. Seventy-five years of church life ! how much that means of struggle, prayers and service ! How far reaching the results! But when I think of this church, with its two hundred years of life behind it, it makes my church seem quite youthful. Two hundred years of church life! How much more that means of faith, self-sacrifice and success !
It is not an easy matter, except in a general way, to indicate the value of a church like this to the community in which it is placed. I have been thinking, as these interesting commemorative services have been progressing, of the value of this old church, first, to the industries of this city.
There are some men, immersed in the affairs of the world, who seem to think a church does not amount to much. To them, the only valuable things are those that can be weighed and measured. The busy factory, with its daily out-put of manufactured goods, is to them the symbol of utility. It is not an easy matter to make an inventory of the total out- put of a Christian church through a period of two hundred years. The merchant, the manufacturer can turn to his shelves or his wareroom, and there
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he finds the physical products. He can put down their value, foot up the column, and get the grand total. The results of church life are too subtle to be caught by the pen and transferred to paper. If you look at this stately and comely edifice, at the church roll, or the assembled congregation, these represent only a part, and by far the least import- ant part, of her work. Her work is chiefly spirit- ual, and yet she indirectly determines the style of architecture for your homes and places of busi- ness. It would be difficult to discover one single worthy enterprise in which the helpful influence of the church is not felt. Your public and indus- trial schools, your cemetery, monuments, library, and all your humane and philanthropic institu- tions could not have had an existence without her friendly aid. Your industries would not have been so prosperous without her. Her elevating and inspiring touch has been felt in all the avenues of your busy life.
It is not enough, to say that religion does not disqualify a man for business. It is the crown of all his other virtues. It gives cunning to the hand, clearness to the vision, and strength to the judg- ment. The church has been the promoter of har- mony between the capitalist and the laborer. Uncon- sciously your Christian influence has pulsed itself in every artery and vein of your bounding activities. It is the Christian spirit of so many of your leading business men that has given so enviable a name to your industries,-preserved their harmo- ny and led to their wonderful success.
I have also been reminded of what the church has done, secondly, for the moral character of your city.
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Waterbury is very far from being perfect. If she had attained unto perfection, then might this ven- erable church say, with good old Simeon, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation." Nevertheless in excellent morals and manners your beautiful city is unsurpassed. Without the church it would have been a very Sodom. These churches have been and still are as salt which has not lost its savor. A force more potent than your mayor, council and police has been among you, unrecognized by many, and yet it has been the promoter of law and order,- has given you a wide reputation for peace and quiet; and that force has been exerted largely through the church. Remove these churches and all that they stand for, and very soon you would lapse into barbarism.
I have been thinking, too, in the third place, of the grand total and the wide and beneficent results of your benevolent contributions through all these years.
While you have derived benefits for yourselves from this church, you have not forgotten to do good and to communicate to others. The rich clusters that have fallen from this goodly vine have strengthened and cheered many other lives. By giving your life, you have found it richer and larger. Many a desert place has been made to bloom and smile through your generous bene- factions. You have found it (as these children have come back to you and their heroic struggles and successes have been rehearsed) "more blessed to give than to receive."
I have been thinking, once more, that it must be a delightful thought for you to cherish-the thought
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of that long line of saints that this church has been the means of preparing for their reward and rest. As you call to remembrance the former days, you cannot but think of those "who through faith and patience have inherited the promises." The grim messenger has come to all your homes through these years. It would be pleasant for you to go over that long list and (as you called their names) speak of their prayers, patience and purpose- their many virtues and their eminent services. This church has been to them the house of bread-as the shelter of a rock in a desert land-as the springs and palms of Elim to their thirsty and weary souls.
Thus, under God, she has been the means of con- serving every interest among you that was worth conserving.
In view then of your magnificent history, and because you have so faithfully kept the faith and delivered it to the saints, I bring to you, to-night, the fraternal greetings of ancient Woodbury,-a town that was settled before yours, and for many years more important than any in all this region
In the early days it was an active centre of trade. Farming was the elect and prosperous occupation. Had we known of the present decadence of the country village-had we known that manufacturing was to be the foundation of future greatness, and that the railways were to follow the water courses, we should have moved our town over into this beautiful valley. Somewhere in the race you have passed us, and we have been compelled to con- tribute to your splendid and prosperous life. But we do not envy you your greatness and prosperity; we rejoice in it.
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Our blood is in your veins. A constant stream of helpful and stimulating influences has been flowing into your life to deepen and broaden the tide of your prosperity. Our produce has come to your markets; we have fed you with milk, and should be glad to feed you with meat, did not Chicago forbid. As we come down into this valley to trade with your merchants and manufacturers, we say to our- selves, with pride, This is the great and mighty Babylon which we have helped to build!
I also bring to you the Christian salutations of our churches of the same order-one of which is older than yours. Twenty-one years ago she celebrated her two hundredth anniversary; so you see we had reached our majority before you were born. Our churches, like our town, have contributed to your marvellous development.
During my ministry of twenty years in Wood- bury, thirty-five young men have gone from my parish to seek employment in your city, most of whom have come to you fortified with Christian principle. My church has furnished to your daugh- ter, here, two men who "have served well as deacons," and "gained to themselves a good stand- ing and great boldness in the faith which is in Christ Jesus." Of not a few on the roll of this church it is their proud distinction that they were born in Woodbury. Our loss has been your gain.
As the representative of ancient Woodbury and her two churches, mother and daughter, dwelling together in Christian concord, I ask you to accept our Christian salutations and congratulations. We, too, have a deep interest in your history; we prize your fellowship, and we pray for your prosperity
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and peace. May the streams that flow from the springs among the hills continue to make glad this Zion, and may it become as the garden of the Lord.
The Master whom you have served so loyally in the past has bidden you pause, for a little, and call to remembrance the former days, but his command to you to-night is, Arise and go forward to new con- flicts and still grander victories. And his promise is, " Lo I am with you alway, even to the end of the days."
The true and grand idea of a church is-a society for the purpose of making men and women Christ- like-earth like heaven-the kingdoms of the world like the kingdom of God !
May you understand your mission, and perform it !
ADDRESS BY THE REV. J. S. ZELIE,
PASTOR OF THE CHURCH IN PLYMOUTH.
There seems to be in these anniversary times just a little of what strikes us as a sigh of relief. Those who go to school look upon the drudgery days as in a special sense the property of their teachers, and the anniversary days as their own; and though they allow their teachers to be present, the anniversary day is chiefly an assertion of them- selves. Do we not find hidden away in our con- sciousness, at this time and at all such times, a little of the elation which attends a graduation ? We address cordial words to the memories of our teachers, while our real thoughts are with our- selves. Which is the true spirit of these memorial
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days - self-congratulation or self-forgetfulness ? The latter feeling seems nearer to the truth, and makes us recognize that these days do not belong to us as much as to those who have gone before. Self-congratulation does not have quite the true ring to it.
If we are to congratulate ourselves at all about the "good old days," let us congratulate ourselves that they have been, rather than that they have ended. To make these old divines and the lay peo- ple of whom they were but the spokesmen seem more real to us than ourselves, to summon up their names and faces out of their long repose, not to make them live over again, but to see that they do live over and over again, to make these hours not so much their memorial as their resurrection and their epiphany, to give them not so much an eulogy as an "All hail," is to me the real purpose of this anniversary. We have not been dreaming, while those who have spoken to us have caused to pass before our minds this long procession of our fathers. They are as real as they have seemed. We speak of " burying ourselves " in the past, but "living ourselves into it" is the expression which comes nearer to the true idea of history. We have not been made to have a clearer vision of what was, without having obtained also a clearer sight of what is. And when to-night the benediction falls upon us, it will not be the benediction of one man alone, ending a dream and saying, "Here end the things that have been," but the heaped up bless- ing of all these beautiful years, and of all these ancient ministers speaking through one and telling us that yesterday and to-day they have stepped for- ward with us, and that they go on with us.
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How much real meaning can these days have for those of us who are younger? We know that it is not difficult for these older ministers and laymen to enter into the spirit of them, that it is easy for those who have lived in these places and who have become familiar with their history; but we natur- ally wonder whether the younger ones among us can really get anything out of the days except an indefinite pleasure in knowing that something important is going on and that we are witnesses of it. Yes, there is much for those who are young. I never came into a region where the past seemed so present as among these hills. The towns are as modern as others of the kind, but there is a " brooding" spirit here which I have never felt elsewhere. Other regions, of traditions as noble, seem to have hurried away faster from their tradi- tions, but here, though we have made as much pro- gress, it seems as if our past had stayed more loyally by us. The least familiar of any here with the literal history of these churches, I yet do not feel anything like a stranger to them. The old names still linger, with scanty facts attached to them, but they are more than names to me. I feel that I know them in the spirit.
There is no one class of men more attractive to me than the old New England divines. We have heard much to-day of what they did, of the dates of their doings, of their hardships, their heroisms, but not quite so much as I should have liked to hear of what they were. I had hoped to hear a little more about their personal habits and appearance, about three-cornered hats and knee-buckles and reverend manners, of the old Puritan laughter which came
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from the depths when it did come,-for this gift God seldom withholds from the best of his ser- vants, and there must have been times when the souls of Jeremiah Peck and John Southmayd and Mark Leavenworth, in spite of their natural grav- ity, broke out into grand and restful mirth. How grave the records of their doings read, except for the interlined additions of some lay recorder who here and there leaves us a narrative of their wit and their oddities. But they do not seem ancient in much beside dress and expression. The human heart and the unselfish outpouring of the human soul never become antiquities. Words may; dress, manners and doctrine may, -though the latter always a little less so than it seems; but to him who has once realized that human life, in any age or place, is the water of an eternal fountain, men never become antiquities.
It is possible that our prejudices about the old divines have sprung largely from the outside appearance of their books. Their literary works run into no new bindings, through no new edi- tions. But they themselves are issued over and over, in the widely circulated editions of human lives which have caught up and handed on their influence. The dryness of their books and the richness of the men themselves seem strangely at variance. We wonder how those who wrote so dryly, and who dealt with so many themes which to us seem artificial, could ever have been very human in their dealings with men. But they were wonderfully so, and human beings seem to have been just what was necessary to draw out their richness. The ancient ministers of Plymouth out
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in the churchyard, the old worthies of your church here, who have been brought to our remembrance, do not seem so dead as some modern church mem- bers, whose lives long since ended, so far as the church is concerned, and whose works, if they per- form any now, must be classed as "posthumous."
We can hardly imagine nowadays how men can be helped without the aid of church machinery. Our clerical ancestors knew as little about it as the apostles did; and we, with all our many different charities and methods for helping men, fall to wondering, perhaps, if they ever really did any- thing but preach. As we come to learn more about them we may wonder rather if there was ever poured out from one life to another more strong, abiding vitality than these men poured into the lives they ministered to. The humanity and tenderness for which we seek almost in vain in their writings, and which seem there to have given place to a kind of November righteousness, did shine out of their lives in unselfish, unfearing devotion to the real needs of the human heart. In the midst of our endless committees, societies and plans, do we not long once in a while for the old simplicity with which our ancestors grappled with human life at first hand, and not through the medium of church machinery ?
They had their follies, and we are all well posted in them, but they seem to us different when we discover how vital these men still are. The follies of these men were mostly of such a kind as not to prevent their staying a life-time in a place. The follies of the modern minister are of a different sort.
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At our distance from the early theologians, and on one of these occasions, we are likely to get a better understanding of the place they hold in the history of the world's thought. As we look back and see how individual they were, and how sep- arate from the general thought of the world, it seems as if there was one thing, much talked of now, which they did not have, and that is the cath- olic spirit. They appear to have done their thinking without much regard to those around them or before them, and New England theology seems to be in a little corner by itself. They did not bend or swerve, but thought straight on from point to point, from logic to logic. We look upon right thinking as being more in a circle than a straight line, and the Puri- tan thinking seems at first sight to have gone on too straight, and to have run away from the world's thought. But, now that we are getting further from it all the time, that which at first looked so much like a straight line begins to look more like a curve and we can see how the Puritan thought is bending into one of God's great circles of truth.
But this is a thanksgiving service, and you have not been mistaken if you have expected the church on Plymouth Hill to be grateful for its parentage. We do not have to cast about in our minds for things to be grateful for; we are glad to be derived from a church like this. We forget our long strug- gle with you for "winter privileges," and, as you desired that we should remain in want of them, I may say to you that Plymouth Hill is as much in need of " winter privileges " as it ever was, though of a dif- ferent sort. You have honored us; have we honored you ? The old Plymouth church is less to-day than
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her children are, but they can never be anything but our children. Perhaps our only superiority now is that we are one degree nearer of kin to you. They have their prosperities, but the old ministers of Plymouth belong to us, and we are content to stay by their graves and feel that all of their spirit has not departed from us. The church has given noble men to the world, and is still raising them, and we have not been left alone as much as some of our sisters of the other hill-tops. As we come back here for this anniversary, we feel as if we had gained a coat of arms and a noble pedigree.
And I wish to add my own thanksgiving to that of the church; for I have that for which to be per- sonally grateful. The name of your church, the name of your minister, was familiar to me, before I came here to live. I knew the church by sight before I ever saw it. I first became a church mem- ber in a college to which this church gave its pres- ident, and as he was present when that first mem- bership was given me I feel very glad to know that he is present here, when I receive this second mem- bership which you intend, I am sure, that all of us shall have. I am indebted to the minister of this church for an ordination sermon which neither my people nor myself have ever forgotten, which has come back to the memories of some of us many a time when we have grown perhaps a little discour- aged over the affairs of the church, and has made us feel that the true success of a church is different from what we once thought it was. I acknowledge, too, my indebtedness to one of the old, old sons of this church, Samuel Hopkins, for real inspira- tions.
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And now the two hundred years are over,-as much as two hundred years ever can be over; for two centuries, filled with loyalty to God and Christ and humanity, have laid hold on all the years that follow with a grasp which cannot be broken.
ADDRESS BY FRANKLIN CARTER, LL. D.,
PRESIDENT OF WILLIAMS COLLEGE.
There is nothing that attests the significance of time to the human mind more than the celebra- tions of these latter days. Biography is not merely a series of events; it is imperfect unless we can fix the date into its surroundings and mark it with a figure. History is not merely a succes- sion of developing causes and effects, not merely a combination of co-ordinations,-for an end; we are unsatisfied unless we are able to tell when the combination entered into the history, unless we are able to tell how and when the master mind lighted up the period with a celestial beauty or darkened it with the horrors and hate of war.
We have been celebrating an event which lighted up this Naugatuck valley with a "light that never was on sea or land." We have been rejoicing that we, in our period, have covered the end of the two hundred years; we have been glad that we could, after the lapse of these days, come back here and gather around the old hearthstone, and bless God for the old home. But many, whose spiritual lives began anew in connection with this church, have almost lived to see this day and have not seen it;
PRESIDENT CARTER'S ADDRESS.
some dropped away long ago, and pathos is in our hearts for those who, early or late, are here to share with us this joy-that they have lived to see this day.
My mother's ancestors were connected with church away back to the very first deacon, and wife's mother's ancestors back to the first mi ters; so that in my children is the blood both the "diaconate" and of the "priesthood." father was not born in this place, but was h converted, and within a few years there has co into my possession a record of his consecration himself to God on reaching his majority, a rec which never could have been written except the solemn influences of the Puritans. It ta one back to the days of Samuel Hopkins and Jo than Edwards. It reminds me of the form of c secration found in the autobiography of Sam Hopkins, who was born in this town in 1721, Wa member of this church, and became a pioneer the realm of thought,-so that when the Ando Seminary was formed, it was formed by a co promise between Calvinists and "Hopkinsians, leading the way to all the modern liberty and all the modern conquests of scholarship. The echoes of his utterances were heard in the rec decision of the Supreme Court of Massachus in the Andover case, or later still, in the case t was decided in the Presbytery of New York yest day. This is the consecration of Samuel Hopk dated August 7th, 1742, just before he reached majority:
I call heaven and earth to witness that I now take the ( of heaven and earth for my God. I now make myself o
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with all that I have or ever shall have, to him. I now promise allegiance to the God of heaven,-that henceforth I will make it my only business to serve and honor him, begging his gra- cious assistance to perform my obligations and to keep my sol- emn vows inviolate. It is done. I am no more my own, but I give myself to God, to be his forever.
That covenant, written in 1742 by a son of this church, may stand as a proof that fifty years after this church was organized the same solemn influ- ences pervaded it as at the beginning. The coven- ant of my father, which is enough like that to have been modelled upon it, may stand as a testimony that seventy years ago the same solemn influences pervaded this church; and I can testify that up to the time when I left my home in 1863, the doctrine that God has authority over every mental move- ment of man and every thought of man, just as surely as the law of gravitation has authority over every particle of matter, was preached from this desk. The doctrine of God's omniscience, omni- presence and sovereign decrees was the influence that I felt in my boyhood.
I owe the two ministers who spoke this after- noon an incalculable debt. From the first came impulses for good which I trust have ever increased; the other was concerned with some of the most solemn events of my childhood. I can remember sitting down in the church when I was not yet twelve years old, wondering and puzzling my brain as to whether I was one of the elect. I can remember studying the old hangings behind the pulpit, which I thought must have a likeness to the hangings of the tabernacle, and wondering what connection there could be between them and the sovereignty of God. I thank God for my Puri-
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